Site of the Day: Listen to Your Buds!

I'm enthusiastic about iPods and other small music players being great tools for calming and occupying kids in stressful situations -- and also for bribery purposes, since a 99-cent iTunes song is a highly motivating but fairly painless incentive. But there can be one unintended side effect of frequent use of the devices, and that is hearing loss due to over-enthusiastic volume-setting.

Listen to Your Buds! is an effort of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association to get people to heed their warnings about the potential of those little earbud-hooked devices for hurting kids' hearing. The site has a fun format with animated artwork and games to play with your child, but it also has articles and videos helping to make the message clear that while music players aren't bad, putting something in your ear and blasting the volume is.

Since children with special needs may not be able to sense when something's too loud, this site may be a good one to view with your young music lover. The illustrations and animations could be more convincing than any amount of parental cautions -- 'cause you know they sure can tune us out.